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Saturday, May 28, 2011


The Google TV Puzzle

Original post from google tv official blog

If you didn't make it to the Building Android Apps for Google TV session at Google I/O or don't follow our Twitter updates, you may not have seen the puzzle we posted.


We're happy to announce that we have 3 winners, one for each Google TV device, who will be receiving the Honeycomb version of Google TV one week before we send it to all Google TV devices. Congratulations to Benji Hertel, Alecia Householder, and Jan Jorgensen on their quick wit in solving the puzzle! The winners will receive early access to Android 3.1 Honeycomb on Google TV.

We saw a lot of interesting methods being used in an attempt to solve the puzzle and were impressed by the creativity displayed (e.g. http://yfrog.com/z/h2s0sjhj). Our puzzle masters Rich Bragg and Erica Baker even planted a number of signposts with a few subtle hints along the way (http://goo.gl/bgyrygbrg, http://goo.gl/ygbgbrryg, http://goo.gl/ovtotrntv).

Ultimately, they designed the puzzle to be slightly easier to solve if you happen to own a Google TV device. Here's how it worked:

Justin Koh, a Google TV engineer, hid an Easter Egg in the Google TV home screen. If you've ever clicked the white Google TV logo at the top left of the Home screen, you may have noticed that the little boxes change colors. What you may not have realized (unless you already solved the puzzle) is that the boxes flash in a specific timing pattern: Morse code!

The flashing boxes spell out two messages that Google TV fans may recognize:

Y O U H A V E S W I T C H E D T O T H E O T H E R B O X

I A M N O T A L O N E L Y T V


If you plug those letters into the puzzle, you get something that looks like this:

Y O U H A V E S W I T C H E D T O T H E O T H E R B O X

I A M N O T A L O N E L Y T V .


If you isolate the colored boxes on their own, you see the following:

O V T O T R N T V .


Do those colors look familiar? They should! The are the colors from our logo, which you can see below.

Of course the colored boxes in the puzzle are not in the same order as the colors in our logo. Re-arrange the boxes from the puzzle with the letters inside and this is what you'd find:

T V O .

R N O .

T T V .


Make it a bit easier to read and...

T V O R N O T T V .


TVorNotTV, that is the ques...er..solution. Ok, technically the solution was to visit http://goo.gl/tvornottv but that doesn't roll off the tongue nearly as well.

Now that this cat's out of the bag, we'll be putting on our thinking caps to come up with something even trickier for Honeycomb.

Thanks for your participation!

see also: